Willfried
Brauseberger Von Schwautz has always been a sort of enigma to
me. And yet, when one looks towards the horizon, one can often
see him smiling, perched on his bicycle. Waving invitingly with
one hand, he holds his machine immobile with the other. And
whenever one dares to come a little nearer him, he vigorously
pedals further away. But he waves still. He smiles, like a long
longed-for father figure. A father whose unmeasurable knowledge
is too huge for the common man, too huge to be dealt with, so
huge that it will always estrange us; and we will only be able
to guess at the divinity which invites us so, to an incomparable
journey. A journey inwards.
Inwards
towards the core, anti-clockwise, back to better times, for
as everyone well knows, in days of old was all indeed better.
Back to the core of the being, to the very essence of Nature,
to prayer, to one's self and towards those close to us.
The
Schwautzian cross symbolises this inward journey. But the very
name of cross is in itself misleading, since neither things
or people ever cross one another in the Schwautzian world. Everything
is indeed born from the core and grows like life itself outwards,
like an atomic structure, like the branches of an oak. And everything
fades on the outer limit, becomes crippled and whither back
towards its newly recovered roots and trunk and dies according
to nature's plans, by growing back inwards on itself. Like the
Big Bang, like the flower of youth, so is old age, an implosion
of the senses, an implosion of will.
Neither
the Swastika, nor any other such holy crosses embodie this simple
principle of life so well as the Schwautzian cross. Not even
Willigut's Black Sun, which is indeed far from it. The core
of the Black Sun is nothing but a conglomerate of a few rays,
which meet in its centre (or so we hope), and so doing ignore
the basic laws of Nature. Such symbols show nothing more than
the rationalisation of life, or life's need to submit itself
to a more orderly structure. And in our days of the digital
plague, such thinking-grids are at their climax: things must
all seem schematised, run in straight lines and, of course,
cross one another, so as to create an illusion of multiplicity
(even though each child knows that when a branch meets another,
it allows itself the right to grow by its side: the eternal
fight of nature knows no crossing without destruction). And
so it is obvious that today it is not computers which must look
like men, but men who must look like computers. Progress makes
it so that this life of ours must run precisely according to
plan.
Things
are different with Schwautz. His structures are life, sun, birth
and death, sorrow and comfort, here and there, up and down.
His ideology is a road whose aim is its starting point. There,
the young scream without knowing why and the old know without
screaming. He who was a young man comes back in a cyclic process
as elderly man to the source of nature.
And
now, it is the journey inwards, our last trip to the gates of
Death, which rejoices us old people the most, us who do not
have the strength to sprout and spurt any more, the courage
to unfurl. The exhausting road incites us to go home, back to
the earth from which we were once born. And with it comes this
compulsive urge, which drives us to overcome and understand
our own selves, and then, like Schwautz, to greet the screaming
youth in the horizon and invite it to witness our self-celebration.
And
so we ride ahead on our bicycles...